Windows Phone 7: The Ars Review

The smartphone market ain't what it used to be. Four years ago, Symbian ruled the world—it was totally dominant in every market but three: Japan and China both had strong showings from Linux, and the North American market was split roughly evenly between RIM, Microsoft, and PalmSource. Worldwide, smartphone sales amounted to some 60 to 65 million.

Then Apple came along with the iPhone in 2007 and changed the world.

The iPhone did four things. It showed us what could be done with finger-based user interfaces—that they could be easy to use, easy to type on, flexible, and good-looking. It made smartphones mass-market, consumer-oriented gadgets, breaking them free of their corporate shackles. It showed that smartphones were viable web browsing platforms, just as long as they were equipped with a good browser. And, eventually, it showed that there was a lot of value to be had in integrating an online application store.

Windows Mobile was a solid performer in the old smartphone world, but it never moved into the new, post-iPhone smartphone world. Windows Mobile 6.5, released in May 2009, was a half-hearted attempt to bring the system up-to-date with a finger-friendly home screen and Start menu-type-thing, but the interface was crudely grafted on and plainly unsatisfactory. This wasn't finger-friendly, consumer-friendly, modern smartphone software, and everyone knew it. It didn't halt Windows Mobile's marketshare slide, much less turn it around.

If Microsoft wanted to remain a player in the smartphone market, something would have to change. Windows Phone 7 is that change.

Windows Phone 7 is a smartphone platform that's aimed first and foremost at consumers. It's designed from the ground up for a finger-driven interface. It's built to be clean, attractive, and consistent. The ambition is that it will finally give Microsoft a platform that will enable it to take on the iPhone and Android phones. Virtually everything that Windows Mobile did is now ancient history. Windows Phone 7 ushers in a new era of Microsoft-powered smartphones.

Hardware

In many ways the hardware is the biggest similarity between Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, because with the new operating system, just as with the old one, Microsoft is leaving the hardware to third parties. Unlike with Windows Mobile, however, the company is being extremely strict about what's allowed and what's not. Every Windows Phone 7 device must meet the minimum specification.

This is a high specification; these are premium handsets, so they'll be priced towards the upper end of the spectrum. When Windows Phone 7 was first announced, Microsoft said that at some point after launch, lower resolution 480×320 devices would also be supported, and even further into the future, an as-yet unspecified third resolution/form-factor would also be added.

At the moment, however, all the focus is on the 800×480 models, and personally, I think Microsoft should stick with this for as long as possible before venturing into new designs. The iPhone has demonstrated that you don't need a billion different models to be successful, and by sticking with one resolution, the job for application developers is made a great deal easier.

Even within these constraints, the initial handset partners—Dell, HTC, Samsung, and LG—have a reasonably broad range of options, with screens ranging from 3.5" to 4.3", 8 or 16GB of storage, and one with an 8MP camera. Dell's phone, the Venue Pro, includes a vertical (potrait) slider keyboard, and next year Sprint will release an HTC device, the 7 Pro, which will include a more conventional horizontal (landscape) slider keyboard. We took a quick look at the launch models last week, and you can see our initial thoughts on the UK and US offerings.

Some models appear also to have forward-facing cameras. Windows Phone 7 doesn't presently support video calling, which is unfortunate for those of us in parts of the world where such things have been a feature of the telephony landscape for many years. If this is indeed the case, it may be an indication that video calling is coming sooner rather than later.

The most unique, Windows Phone 7-specific feature of the hardware is the hardware buttons. Although the user interface is predominantly touch-driven, the specification mandates a set of hardware buttons. The power, volume, and camera buttons are self-explanatory; it's the Start, search, and back buttons that will be the hallmark of Windows Phone 7 devices. These mandatory buttons are perhaps the biggest reason why, to the chagrin of many, devices that otherwise ought to live up to the Windows Phone 7 specification such as the HTC HD2, won't be upgradable, and will be lumbered with Windows Mobile 6.5 for the rest of their lives.

The button placement is also defined by Microsoft. The back, Start, and search buttons must be on the front of the phone and in that order (though they can be mechanical or capacitive, or some combination of the two). The volume rocker switch must be on the top of the left-hand side, the power button on the top of the right-hand side, and the camera button on the bottom of the right-hand side.

The 3.5mm headphone jack must also support three buttons, volume up, volume down, and a third to answer calls/initiate voice dialling.

Notably missing from the feature list is support for CDMA and EVDO. CDMA support will arrive next year; at the moment, Windows Phone 7 handsets are GSM-only.

The specification allows for minor variations, but it doesn't allow for any radical deviations. The result is that the handsets are far more similar than they are different, and unless Microsoft substantially liberalizes the rules, it looks like it will be difficult for OEMs to produce any truly exceptional or unusual devices. This is good for application developers, as they have fewer targets to aim for, and it's arguably good for consumers, as it means that they can buy a Windows Phone 7 phone with confidence—if you know your way around one Windows Phone 7 phone, you know your way around them all.

It may, however, be bad for the OEMs, who may find themselves with little ability to differentiate and distinguish themselves from each other. OEMs are allowed to include custom applications, but their ability to stamp their own branding onto phones will be far weaker than it is with Android and was with Windows Mobile. If Windows Phone 7 is anything short of an enormous success, it's easy to see them giving up on the platform.

The model I have is a Samsung Omnia 7, and I'm using Orange, in the UK. The most striking feature of the Omnia 7 is its screen; it's a frankly beautiful 4" Super AMOLED display, whose vibrancy and viewing angles are quite delightful. The version I have has 8 GB of internal storage, though a 16 GB version should also be available.

Ok. You hate it. But there are tons of people who love it in equal measure.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder that is true. But when it comes to questions of taste you always have these problems. When it comes to taste I can only talk about me, you can only talk about you but that's not worthless. And apart from that I can make some observation about functionality that are not subjective.

I will readily concede that the black bar is consistent with the UI concept of WP7. But it should be hard to argue against the fact that this consistency was bought with a huge empty useless black bar on the right side of the homescreen (which is IMO the most important screen of the OS). You think that consistency and adherence to the UI concepts are more important than functionality in this case and that is fine. I still would state that this is only one incidence of form over function that seems to define this OS. Which is ok for people who like that, all I said is that these purely designed products are often fawned over by journalists and designers etc. but are not bought.

Apple's PCs and iPods and iPhones also often value form and design. But for example the iPhone if you get down to it has a pretty standard approach of doing things, with buttons, lists, text input boxes all things people know very well when they have once used a PC. You press a button you access an application, you press the home button you are back at the homescreen. Nothing fancy. And some of the best features like inertial scrolling (this little gem alone was a game changer) are mere refinements. But all is very polished. Windows7 with its hubs, multidirectional scrolling and other new concepts is definitely a brave approach to rethink a Phone OS.

But in the end customers will decide. I am curious to see if WP7 will be a success.

I have only one real complaint about WP7 why is it that half the screen shots of said interface have text falling off the edge of the screen like a 2D scroll game from 1994?

The web browser looks good, the mail looks good, and while I personally don't like the look of the interface, I have to admit that MSFT finally thought out side of redmond and designed something new that actually works fairly well the first time around.(minor flaws like copy& paste can be added latter)

As for Facebook integration I don't merge contacts. ever work is seperate from home for a reason. You don't wear dirty shorts and ripped t-shirts to the office, a picture of you getting drunk with your friends should also never go to work either.

The interface looks pretty at first glance, with notifications, but on closer inspection you realize the notifications that it displays are a farce. The Facebook notification is pseudo. It just changes randomly. No 3rd party apps can generate notifications, because they cannot multitask.

The fact that Microsoft produced an Office app that cannot Copy-&-Paste (meaning it cannot move text) should have everyone rolling around on the floor in fits of laughter. It is a complete sham.

Microsoft mandated compulsory hardware features, like compass and camera, but then didn't write the APIs to make them work, so none of the 3rd party apps can access them.

Not even Exchange works properly on Windows Phone 7.

No other company has ever produced an operating system as bad as this. It does nothing well. It is a joke.

Nobody said anything else. Doesn't make it better. IMO its a shitty design decision. Clearly form over function and some user centered design guys running amok

Shitty compared to what? And form over function compared to what?

The current "standard" of notifying that there is more stuff to scroll to the left/right for both iOS and Android is a row of dots that arbitrarily sits either at the top or bottom of the screen, with you current position indicated as the biggest/brightest dot. The dots are usually quite small, but still takes up space (oh noez!), and they also make no sense for first time users because they are just a row of dots.

Cut off text is easily more intuitive than that row of no meaning dots, and you don't have to look for the particular indicator because it is on the entire screen. Everyone knows there's more text to scroll to in a browser when text is cut off, it's already very much conditioned into our computer usage. The design philosophy and its function is actually arguably very sound.

Quick info: SMS character count is available. It just uses the same minimalism you like so much. It's visible when you cross over a single sms limit and will show how the message will be split when you send it.

Quick info: SMS character count is available. It just uses the same minimalism you like so much. It's visible when you cross over a single sms limit and will show how the message will be split when you send it.

Yeah but they take away 10 lines of pixels horizontally instead of almost a third of the screen. And the black bar makes the home screen look asymmetric as well. I have no problem per se with the cut-off text (although it does look a bit irritating but thats just taste) but the home screen is so left leaning. Besides the dots provide you with additional information on the number of screens, they are pretty much standard amongst smartphones, so everyone who has used a smartphone knows what they mean and again they take away much much much less screen real-estate.

@Peter Bright - You should probably add a label to the first email screenshot to note that you've changed your phone theme from dark to light, otherwise people will think that the email app flips the colour scheme.

Nice and thoughtful review. Solution for the back button confusion: how about they implement 'Long press on back button' for backing out of an app? That would bypass the IE back to email issue that you mentioned. In the voice of John Hodgman: "You're welcome!"

Detailed, well written review DrP, best I've read so far. Quick query, did you notice long load times for games like others have?

I recently obtained an iPhone4 through work, but wish I had held out for a W7 device as I already have an iPod Touch. MS looks like they've finally done something aesthetically consistent and disctinct. I really hope it succeeds because it looks awesome.

I will readily concede that the black bar is consistent with the UI concept of WP7. But it should be hard to argue against the fact that this consistency was bought with a huge empty useless black bar on the right side of the homescreen (which is IMO the most important screen of the OS).

While i like the wp7 interface, I think the same. The home screen is cool, but that empty black bar on the right leave me a strange feeling everytime. Leaving out the taste aspect, there is a lot of wasted space on the right of the home screen for just one little circular button.

Personally I don't think ZunePhone would sound better, or good. 7Phone maybe? Keeps the tie to Win7 at least. In addition to ZunePhone not really rolling off the tongue or sounding good, I think a lot of people view the Zune as failed. Most of these people won't have owned or tried a Zune, but that would be part of its failure. Tying a newcomer to something a lot of people perceive as failed (not trying to offend the Zune, I'm sure many of the people who owned and used one liked it) doesn't seem like a good move to me.

The phone looks good, apart from on page 12, but there it's because the reviewer hasn't washed his hands.Overall it looks pretty appealing, though not doing SMS well is sort of silly for a phone. If I had the money handy right now, I might jump on it.

It's very important that the browser follows web standards. Not only it's a hybrid of Explorer 7 and 8, as you say, it does a really bad job in Acid 2 and 3 tests.http://goo.gl/PUbG

Take a look at the Anandtech review. He addresses this issue. Oddly enough, although it performs terribly in these tests, the reviewer never had an issue with page rendering while using the phone. It seems to be a case of specifications not correlating with real world usage.

Here's the link and quote: http://www.anandtech.com/show/3982/wind ... 7-review/9"What’s shocking however is that, so far, it hasn’t really mattered. I’ve spent a week using WP7’s browser, testing every page I can think of that I visit on a daily basis, and have yet to encounter anything that doesn’t render properly or crashes the browser. Never once have I been want for more in fact, outside of the font rendering qualms we noted prior."

Gotta say. Every review (well except Mossberg of course) has been very positive. Looks like MS may have a winner on their hands here

I will readily concede that the black bar is consistent with the UI concept of WP7. But it should be hard to argue against the fact that this consistency was bought with a huge empty useless black bar on the right side of the homescreen (which is IMO the most important screen of the OS).

While i like the wp7 interface, I think the same. The home screen is cool, but that empty black bar on the right leave me a strange feeling everytime. Leaving out the taste aspect, there is a lot of wasted space on the right of the home screen for just one little circular button.

I haven't heard one reviewer complain about the wasted space. I believe WP7 is something you have to use as it doesn't come across well in photos.

In fact I believe WP7 uses the home screen space more effectively than iPhone which is just a glorified app launcher.

I went to a developer meeting at Microsoft's offices here in NYC and I was surprised to learn that the phone has no SQL support, i.e. SQLite, etc. Also, I was surprised to hear that your app cannot "see" through the camera lens. It can take pictures but it couldn't scan a bar code, for example. It cannot hook up to an external video source. The speaker, Charles Petzold, had to have a video camera pointing at the phone to display it for the group on projectors. Lastly, this concept of "Tombstoning" your app on the stack struck me as a strange design decision on MS's part. I'm no pundit so we'll see if consumers like it. In the meanwhile, I have no quarrels with my Droid Incredible.

I'll have to try it out before a final judgement, but are all of the screens as jumbled together as the screen shots? What I mean is, the text all seems to be crammed onto the screen without much to distinguish between one area and another. That would annoy me very quickly. I like the concept that MS is going with here, but the execution seems.... rushed.

I'm getting a Zune vibe here. it had so much potential, but they only made it servicable, but never a standout, and in that type of market (as with the smartphone market), good product or no, it needs to standout!

Are there any "must have" type features? I know it has Xbox Live! and Sharepoint syncing, but what about for the other 80% of the people looking for smartphones? Does it support Flash? Silverlight? Will you be able to install a variation of Firefox? What about fart apps? (I know that you know someone who has one!)

While the iPhone IS NOT (and probably never will be) the perfect smart phone, the vast majority of the tech community faulted it, when it first launched, for missing the very things that Windows Phone 7 misses now more than three years later. So *ANY* claim that Windows Phone 7 is a "fully modern smartphone OS" is pure bullshit.

I haven't heard one reviewer complain about the wasted space. I believe WP7 is something you have to use as it doesn't come across well in photos.

In fact I believe WP7 uses the home screen space more effectively than iPhone which is just a glorified app launcher.

Don't take me wrong, I'm not saying the home screen it's bad designed cause of that, but I was thinking, they needed to make that button, ok, but is it possible that cause of that button you have to make unusable a full column? I'm not a designer and I don't wanna be one, but even if none complained about that space, that doesn't mean it's not there. Well I see it, I think you see it too, probably it's not a problem and the usability it's not at risk cause of that for sure, but I still wonder, is it possible that was the only way of doing it? Is it possible that they did't find a solution to make a button without making unusable so much space? It's the same thing I keep wondering about Firefox 4, huge orange button that makes unusable a whole row of space.

@Peter Bright - You should probably add a label to the first email screenshot to note that you've changed your phone theme from dark to light, otherwise people will think that the email app flips the colour scheme.

Unfortunately, it also resulted in me taking a bunch of pictures of the inside of my pocket and some random dude on the bus, as I happened to sit in such a way as to trigger camera mode. And because I configured the phone to upload pictures automatically, they got sent to Facebook. It's like a whole new kind of pocket dialling; pocket photographing.

I'm not sure why, but this made me laugh.

All things considered, I think this is a great review. I do really like the email client, though, I do find the white to stand out in stark contrast to the darkness of the rest of the screens. It almost seems blinding. There's a lot missing from WP7, but this seems like a good start.

Quote:

Raw features clearly aren't enough to make something a good smartphone platform. Indeed, this was a lesson that took Microsoft a long time to understand: phones are very personal items (people keep them on their person all the time, unlike any mere computer), and it's far more important for a phone platform to feel right than it is for it to tick a load of boxes on a feature list. Redmond does now understand this, and it's why the approach to Windows Phone 7's development was such a radical break from the past. It was the right decision for the iPhone, and it's the right decision for Windows Phone 7 too.

Indeed. Let's hope they have the backbone Apple had and patience to see the delay through to the end.

Loved your review and Anandtech, through and detailed. After reading Walt Mossberg's review, he was dissmissive from the beginning, five words in and he mentions Apple.

On wasted space, it's such a minor issue, if you nit pit then it's obvious, it's not your taste. Similarly iOS and Android have a ton of wasted space. An array of icons (small) have plenty of wasted space around the icons. If your page of icons isnt full, again wasted space also add that the icons wont be symmetrical. If you're arranging widgets, wasted space between widgets and your homescreen may or may not be be symmetrical.

I can respect that you don't like this type of design but it certainly isnt a FLAW.

I want one!!! I'm assuming that there will be a CDMA version on Sprint when I'm eligible for an upgrade next year. I currently am on Android, but I maintain both Google and Live accounts so I wouldn't be left in the dark by switching.

I know it's a Microsoft thing to be late to the party, and it has worked out for them several times, but they don't have an OS monopoly in this market that they can use to win. As a result, they are at a huge disadvantage. Being a first mover is a huge advantage.

With Windows Phone 7, Microsoft finally sheds the baggage of past mobile failures and brings to market a truly slick, finger-friendly, fully modern smartphone OS. But it's not without its faults. Ars takes an in-depth look at the new OS, and at what it means for Microsoft.

Read the whole story

In general I enjoyed the review but the phrase: "I don't know why I liked it but I did." showed up a little too often. Please try harder. It will help me understand why Windows Phone 7 is superior and may give me a better reason to consider buying one than "It's cool!"